[1] Educational Review, February, 1919.
[2] Educational Review, February, 1919.
[3] Teachers College Record, January, 1919.
CHAPTER XII[ToC]
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN EDUCATION
Throughout this study we have again and again been led to consider the relations of the aesthetic experiences to the practical life. It is as the repository of deep desires and as the appreciation of values that the aesthetic may be most readily seen to be practical, but it performs other functions. As ecstatic experience it is the source of power in the conscious life, and it was indeed the belief in art as a means of attaining power that has given art its place in the world. The aesthetic experience is the form also in which desires are brought into relation to one another, harmonized and transformed, or transferred to new objects. So the aesthetic is the type of adaptation in the inner life.
We have asserted that all life, and certainly the educational process, must have its dramatic moments, since the dramatic experience, as ecstasy of the social life, is the expression of social feeling in its highest form. The aesthetic experience is the central point of experience, so to speak, at which social ideals impinge upon and influence and mold pure nature. Art is the form in which play, representing biological forces, is carried to a higher stage, and made a factor in conscious evolution. The aesthetic experience is a practical attitude in another way. It is by our aesthetic appreciation, more than we commonly understand, that we judge life as a totality, that we estimate the fitness of its parts to belong to the whole, and that indeed we guide life when we judge it not according to principles which so often are seen to be inadequate, but when we try to bring to bear our utmost of powers of appreciation and to find ultimate values.